alli is a weight loss pill that works by preventing your body from absorbing the fat that’s in the food you eat. Since dietary fat has been blamed for obesity and all types of degenerative disease, this could be a diet pill that works for thousands of people who need a fast diet but just can’t control their cravings for fatty goodness. But there are a couple of pretty big catches that make it definitely not the best weight loss pill on the market. Before we get into the side effects of alli, let’s talk about what alli is, where it comes from, and how it works.

alli|Orlistat|Xenical|tetrahydrolipstatin

The alli diet pill, which is pronounced “ally” rather than “alley”, is the FDA approved over-the-counter version of the drug Orlistat, which has also been marketed as Xenical.

To understand how alli works, you should first understand the way that your body processes fats that you eat. The fats in the food you eat, much like proteins and carbohydrates, must be broken down into their constituent parts before they can be absorbed into your bloodstream and used for whatever purposes they are useful for. I personally think that people dramatically underestimate the usefulness of dietary fats, but that’s mostly because I like having a brain and I realize that my brain is mostly made of fat. But I’ll get back to that later on.

The same way that carb blockers interfere with your body’s ability to break down carbohydrates, the alli diet pill interfere’s with your body’s ability to break down the fats that you eat. It does this by neutralizing an enzyme called lipase, which is released into the intestines from the pancreas. Without this lipase doing its job, the fats you eat never get absorbed. Since fat is pretty high in calories, alli reduces the effective number of calories you have eaten. Also, if you believe that dietary fat will increase your cholesterol or risk of heart attack and stroke, then you can also score one for alli in terms of reducing these risk factors.

Before I get around to discussing the side effects of alli, I’d like to spend a little time on the efficacy of the drug.

How Effective Are alli Diet Pills?

Most of the people who participated in clinical trials of orlistat/alli lost between 5 and 10% of their total body mass over the course of one year of taking alli. One thing to take into consideration is that this decrease in body mass does not necessarily equate to a decrease in body fat. As far as I can see, measures of actual body fat were not used in these clinical trials. Also, as I have discussed on the muscle building pills and weight loss pills pages, weight loss itself is not really the ideal goal of a healthy diet plan. Rather you should be aiming to improve the quality of your body composition so that you can be trim, toned, and feel excellent.

After the trials of orlistat were complete and the test subjects stopped taking orlistat, many of them started regaining the weight they had lost almost immediately. A significant number of participants gained back as much as 35% of the weight that they had lost while taking the diet pill. One good thing that came out of the trial, for the participants, was a significant decrease in the incidence of type 2 diabetes.

Side effects of the alli diet pill

I mentioned that the alli diet pill prevents your from absorbing fat, but not what happens to that fat after it has gone unabsorbed. Fat is pretty nutritious stuff; it has lots of calories, and usually carries lots of vitamins and minerals, so your body is very well-equipped to absorb it in the early phases of digestion. Since alli prevents this from taking place, the fat continues its downward course through your digestive tract.

The problem is that these lower intestinal regions are not so well equipped to deal with the fat. Why should they be? If this diet pill hadn’t done its work, the fat would have all been absorbed by that point.

Have you ever carried a sub sandwich around for a while? Even though it’s generally wrapped up pretty well, and you try to hold the waxed paper tight so that nothing will escape, eventually all that oily deliciousness starts to seep out through the folds. That’s pretty much what happens when the alli diet pill works.

Many users of alli report bright red and brown oily discharge—not just leakage, mind you: discharge. And it’s uncontrollable, and unpredictable, and it will definitely show up through those pants of yours.

The makers of the alli diet pill offer a very thoughtful and sensitive and thoughtful recommendation to user of their diet drug:

Until you have a sense of any treatment effects, it’s probably a smart idea to wear dark pants, and bring a change of clothes with you to work.

Ouch! All you wanted was to lose a little weight and now you’re carrying around spare pairs of pants and soiling yourself in meetings. But the oily discharge is not the only potential side effect of alli. If you’re lucky, you’ll just get loose, greasy stool (called steatorrhea). If you’re not so lucky, you’ll get the oily discharge, and probably some flatulence as well. If you’re really unlucky, alli might just give you a full-blown case of fecal incontinence.

However, the manufacturers have some sound advice for folks interested in using alli to lose weight but who would prefer to minimize these terrible side effects. Are you ready for this? Don’t eat fat. That’s the official recommendation.

But wait, wasn’t the whole point of alli to allow you to enjoy the benefits of a low fat diet without having to give up the fatty foods you love? Is there any point at all in taking the alli diet pill? Well, maybe the fear of oily rectal discharge will inspire you to stick to your low fat diet a little better. And to top it all off, there is actually also some spotty clinical evidence to suggest that alli may produce a type of lesion in the colon that is often an early precursor of colon cancer. This diet pill sounds great! Where do I sign up?? Perfect lazy weight loss!

The FDA approved this diet drug, so it would appear to be somewhat reasonably safe, but I tell you what: if you are even thinking about spending the money on this over the counter diet drug just on the off chance that alli diet pills work for you, then do yourself a favor and take that exact same money and spend it on a book called Protein Power by Drs. Michael & Mary Dan Eades.

Then, when you’re eating healthy, you can browse through the rest of our diet pill reviews to find a diet pill that works for your chosen weight loss program.

Carb blockers are diet pills that work by preventing many of the carbohydrates you eat from ever being absorbed into your bloodstream. In this diet pill review, we’ll find out how these diet pills work and discuss their effectiveness for different types of dieters.

How Carb Blockers Work

Carbohydrate is really just another word for sugar. Complex carbohydrates, also called starches, are simply chains of sugar molecules strung together. On its own, a starch molecule is basically of no use to you. Your body has to first break down that large molecule into the sugars that it is made of before you can absorb it into your bloodstream and make any kind of use of it. At that point, you will either use it for immediate energy or convert it into fat for storage.

Your digestive tract produces a natural enzyme called alpha-amylase, which breaks down the long molecular chains of complex carbohydrates into the simple sugar that your body can actually use. Carb blockers are diet pills that work by neutralizing this enzyme. Since longer-chain carbohydrates cannot be absorbed into your blood until they have been broken down into sugar, they simply pass through your intestines and are harmlessly expelled.

Click here to buy Carb Blockers on Amazon

What this means is that, when you take carbohydrate-blocking diet pills, much of the starch that you eat will never be absorbed. It will not affect your blood-sugar levels, will not be stored as fat, nada. You win.

However, this also means that carb blockers will not have any effect on your absorption of actual sugars. So your sweet treats will still make you fat, but your breads and french fries will not have as much impact on you as they otherwise would have. That is why carb blockers are probably the best diet pills available for low-carb dieters who just can’t help their cheating ways.

You should also understand that the human body naturally contains millions of bacteria, and many of them live within the digestive tract and will tend to go to work on anything you’ve eaten that your own upper digestive process didn’t finish. Some of these bacteria are capable of breaking down complex carbohydrates, and so some of your undigested starches will be consumed by these intestinal flora. Generally there are two by-products of this bacterial digestive process, one of which is actually quite good, and one of which is maybe not so good. The first thing I mention is a type of fat found in dairy which seems to have some beneficial effects on the metabolism. The other side effect of carb blockers is good old fashioned gas. So you’ll probably be a little gassy when you take carb blockers. Some people experience this worse than others, and my impression is that the effect usually lessens over time. On the bright side, this is the only side effect you’re likely to experience from taking carb blockers.

What’s in a Carb Blocker?

The diet pills themselves contain a simple white kidney bean extract called phaseolamin. This ingredient has been pretty well tested, and from the research I’ve seen phaseolamin is every bit as safe as plain old white kidney beans are, which is very safe. Diet pills that work through the action of this white kidney bean extract are marketed under a number of different brand names. The most common brand name is Phase 2, which I think is a play on the word phaseolamin. Some of the brand names you’ll see out there are:

• Now Foods Phase 2 Starch Neutralizer
• Natrol Carb Intercept
• Doctor’s Diet Carb Block
• Absolute Nutrition CBlock
• Baywood Carb Eliminator
• Health & Nutrition Carb Cutter
• Accuslim Carb Blocker
• Swanson Ultra
  Ultimate Carb Control C-120X

All of these are the exact same white kidney bean extract, as far as I can tell.

Who can benefit from carb blockers?

I’ve already mentioned that carb blockers are pretty much the ideal diet pill for low carb dieters, simply because a low carb diet is all about avoiding carbs, and this diet pill is all about preventing carbs from being absorbed. the way I see it, even a strict low carb dieter who has willpower to spare could benefit from these supplements, since many delicious and nutritious vegetable foods that are generally allowed on a low carb diet still contain some carbs. Carb blockers could help to weed out these incidental carbs, making a strict low carb diet into a super low carb diet with very little additional effort. The idea with a low carb diet, after all, is that the fewer carbs you can manage the better off you’ll be.

However, I also think that pretty much any dieter can see some benefit from blocking their carbohydrate absorption. After all, carbohydrates contain calories, and most dieters would rather have fewer calories going in. So, carb blockers seem like a pretty safe and easy way for folks on low fat or low calorie diets to reduce their overall caloric intake without really sacrificing anything. Sounds like a winner to me.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that although these diet pills work by blocking carbohydrates, they are probably not a total replacement for a low carb diet. Even the more optimistic manufacturers only claim about 60% effectiveness for their carbohydrate blocking supplements, meaning that about 40% of the carbs you eat will still be digested and absorbed. Still, that is certainly enough effectiveness to make a big difference even for someone who simply took these diet pills and made no other dietary changes. On the whole, though, you’ll always do best by eating a healthy diet—whatever that might mean to you and your doctor—and by exercising regularly. Once you’ve made those lifestyle changes, I think your likely to find carb blockers to be a diet pill that works right along with your overarching diet program.

Chitosan is a type of fiber derived from shellfish. It is highly absorbent, and its proponents claim that it is able to absorb the fat out of the food you eat, thereby preventing your body from absorbing those excess calories. This diet pill review will try to determine whether chitosan is among the best weightloss pills.

Much like the new over-the-counter weight loss drug “alli”, chitosan is supposed to be a diet pill that works by preventing your body from absorbing fat. The fat then travels “harmlessly” through your digestive tract and is excreted. Of course, with alli that can often lead to an extremely embarrassing mess. You can learn more about the ugly side effects of alli on our alli diet pill review page.

Click here to buy Chitosan on Amazon

There is no evidence that chitosan causes the same messy side effects as alli. Unfortunately, that’s mostly because there is actually very little evidence that chitosan does anything at all when used as a part of a weight loss plan. Chitosan is one of the most heavily marketed and least-studied diet pills out there. Based on chitosan’s composition, I do think it’s unlikely that taking chitosan diet pills will kill you, unless you have a shellfish allergy. However, I would also say that chitosan diet pills are unlikely to result in significant weight loss.

What’s more, even if a chitosan diet pill works exactly as described, preventing large amounts of the fat that you eat from being digested, I still wouldn’t recommend it. Many of the most important vitamins and minerals in the food we eat are fat-soluble, meaning you can only get them into your body by eating fat. If you were to bind up all the fat you ate into a chitosan diet pill and poop it out, you would have also lost out on many of your body’s most-needed nutrients. This would expose you to a number of severe health risks, including deficiencies and degenerative diseases.

The verdict? Chitosan does not seem to be a diet pill that works. I suggest that you instead try a carb blocking diet pill.